


Love in  a Time of Mutants

by mitspeiler, polyfandrous



Series: Polymit's February Writeoff! [4]
Category: Hiveswap, Homestuck
Genre: Ambiguous Genders, Culling, Explosions, I don't judge, I don't want to hear it, I mean come on, Nora is literally John and Roxy's daughter, Other, RWBY sorta, Sexy Times, girl/boy/androgyne that is, the person is you, you like the weird stuff, you naughty girl
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-15
Updated: 2015-02-15
Packaged: 2018-03-12 22:04:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3356948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mitspeiler/pseuds/mitspeiler, https://archiveofourown.org/users/polyfandrous/pseuds/polyfandrous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Week 2's installment in the Polymit write-off!  Out prompt today was short but sweet and weird as fuck.  Suggested by mitspeiler: reader/imperial drone.<br/>And now here it is, submitted for your approval.  Don't forget to heap your love and praise upon the winner!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love in  a Time of Mutants

You wipe a single tear from your eye.  He loved their brownish bluish greenish color.  He loved everything about you, from your paleish tannish skin to your shortish longish darkish hair, and now he’s gone.

You step through the dark mulch along the roadside; the pink leaves don’t crunch underneath because it rained last night, they just smush into paste under your sneakers, and you wonder why they only make roads for vehicles despite that fact that most Alternians walk.

You aren’t wearing your fake horns; it’s daytime.  The red sun is angry and hot, but not that bad, all things considered.  You wrapped your head in a wrap made of grey cloth, and the grey paint acts as a surprisingly good sunscreen.  You figured trolls were just overly sensitive to radiation.

You hoped you were right.

 

When you arrived on this strange planet, you felt like a reverse John Carter.  The stargate-like thing in the attic, with its eerie carven serpents and skeletal angel engravings called to you, like the ocean calls to sailors and the stars call to astronauts.  It promised to take you farther away than any human had ever been or ever would be, and to send you back with tales of your travels, like the prophet Ezekiel.  You touched it and then there was a light like a brilliant lance, red and green together, one going up, beyond the reaches of the universe, the other going down.  For just an instant, you could swear you saw someone else, going your way, and wondered how an alien would experience your world, and hoped they had as good a time as you did.

You were found in a field by a beautiful alien boy.  He had sad eyes and horns like an aurochs; in the light of the twin moons they gleamed like a third, crescent moon.  He was kind to you, and hid you in his hive, a charming little farm where he raised bees (“for computers, you know?” he said; you did not, but nodded and smiled) and milled his own flour (from the bones of woofbeasts) in a windmill (whose sails were made from the wings of monstrous insects).

Everything was strange and different and wonderful, but you were no John Carter.  All the local people were strong enough to tear you in half.  There would be no rescue of princesses and becoming monarch of Helium for you, no sir/madame/Mx.  You and your one friend were just going to hide your existence for as long as possible and try to find another way home.

He let a few people in on your secret, people he thought he could trust.  Most of them thought you were so exotically beautiful, with the brown and white tones in your impossibly soft skin, your strangely hornless head, your casteless eyes with their white sclerae, flat little teeth, like some kind of fairy who could do no harm.  You felt empowered like you never had back on Earth.  It’s not that you had bad self-esteem, no.  You were quite content with yourself as a person and with your appearance, and you thought that that was all you’d ever needed.  Your sister Nora, now she was beautiful and strong and all kinds of things you thought you never could be, with her blazing hair and her rockethammer.  She was fire like Mom, but also wind like Pop.  And you were fine with that.  Really.  Here though, on Alternia, you were not just liked but beloved, by your small circle of secret keepers at least.  You felt like the prettiest boy/girl/androgyne at school.

Whenever your new friends gathered around to worship you though, your host always held back.  He was so cute, and yet so sad, always tense.  “Joey,” he would say, only very rarely—you savored the sound of your name on his lips—“Why do you let them…ogle you like that?”

“Because it’s new and different,” you would say with a little giggle.  You couldn’t truly express in words all the things you knew, or begin to explain about Nora and Mom and Pop.  And then he would grumble and go tend his bees.  You didn’t like that.

One day you followed him.  You were angrier than usual.  Was he just jealous that they all seemed to like you better than him?  Because that was ridiculous, he was the only one out of all of them who saw you as a person as opposed to some kind of exotic alien pet.  You went and gave him an earful, and he started getting all up in your face about how he didn’t want you in the black, and just what the hell did that mean?  Was “black” some kind of insult?  It sounded, the way he said it, the same way a douchebag piece of shit boy back home once called Nora a slut, and you were not gonna take it gracefully like she did!  You would show him, talking about you like that and right to your face!  You shoved him to the ground and started hitting him, just little sissy slaps because fighting never came easy to you; you supposed a family of warriors must eventually breed some kind of über-pacifist who can’t even be taught to throw a punch by their god-father who happened to be the greatest martial-artist and film director alive, and then suddenly you were kissing, and rolling around in the moonlight— _right_ there in the moonlight, trolls were nocturnal any passerby would’ve been able to see—all the sounds you were making were muffled by the sounds of the bees, buzzing in time to the electromagnetic emissions of the planet itself, and thanks to the tall grass no one saw your host push up your skirt and touch—

Whatever it is you have down there; a boy/girl/androgyne needs to have his/her/their secrets after all.  Regardless of who put what bits in where (and you were both _very_ confused by each other’s respective equipments but you managed), and how much of a mess he made (how does that much of _anything_ come out of a person’s whatever-he-called-it?) there was no way to dispute the fact that what you two “made” that night was “love”.

He carried you back inside for another go in his bedroom— _respiteblock_ you remind yourself; you keep forgetting the lingo—and this one’s even better, except for the fact that at the end he gets up and finishes into a bucket, which is super gross, and leaves it by the door, right there where anyone could see, which is even worse.  A little panel lights up behind it, activated by the weight, and you have no clue what to make of that.  But you forget about that when he builds up a blanket pile in the middle of the floor and you cuddle.  He asks if this means you aren’t black after all and this time you punch him in his beautiful hunter’s moon horns because you know those things are sensitive as shit, and demand that he explain that word.

And then he explains the intricacies of troll romance to you in such a way that your brain hurts.  He had arrogantly assumed that all romance in the multiverse worked the exact was as it did on Alternia, though to be fair you’d arrogantly assumed that it worked the same way everywhere as it did on Earth, so really you were both culturally incompetent assholes who deserved each other, but before you pass out from confusion layered on top of afterglow, you shake him and say that the two of you are firmly in the red.

 

You two spend the next day in newly flushed bliss and your host hangs a sign on the door that translates into something like “if the hive be boppin’, don’t you be knockin’.”

Someone comes by while you were teaching your host exactly what to do with certain of your parts that he seemed to be having trouble with, and he shoves you down into the blanket pile and hurries to get dressed, muttering a steady stream of “SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT,” as he runs to answer the door.

Something big comes in side, just rams the door down, and you cover your mouth to avoid being discovered.

He talks to the visitor, just plain small talk, but all it does is let out a stream of burbling growls, as if it didn’t really have a proper mouth or vocal chords or anything of the like.  Then there is a metallic scraping and a sloshing of thick liquid, and it leaves, heavy steps pounding the dirt outside.

You ask your lover what that was and he explains.  An imperial drone, a strange, monstrous cousin to the troll race that serves the mother grubs and by extension the empress.  Whenever trolls mate they’re required to leave their mixed genetic materials in a bucket to be collected by the drones and used to fertilize the mother grubs’ eggs.  He’d foolishly left the bucket on the collection plate, even though it was really only his DNA in there.  There might be trace amounts of your own, he said, but certainly not enough to get him in trouble, considering how little genetic material humans produce (he’d been a bit disappointed the first time and wondered why you hadn’t…ahem).

 

He was entirely wrong, as was proven the next night when the imperial drone came for him again.  It tore through the wall this time, and your lover barely had enough time to shove you under the blanket pile before the creature saw you.  You saw it this time though.  It was like the monster from _Alien_ if it was three times as large, and had traded in its tail for more spikes and more muscles.  Its heavy, burbling breath sent chills up your spine.  Your lover assumed his fate with dignity.  Before the drone took him, he said, “goodbye, um, bees.  I’ll always love you.”

 

You were, naturally, inconsolable.  Your host’s friends took you in after that, shuffling you around from house to house every few nights in no set pattern.  It seemed more like they did it out of a sense of obligation to your assuredly dead lover than out of affection for you.  “They’re gonna cull him,” said one, the orangeblood with the antlers.  “It’s not really your fault,” he said, though his tone made you think it really was, “it’s his for leaving the damn bucket out.  Never was that smart.”  You smack him, and ask if they aren’t gonna test him at the facility or prison or whatever to make sure your DNA in the bucket wasn’t just a fluke.  He shrugs.  “Even if they did, they never _un_ cull someone.  Best case scenario, they find out he’s pure and then render him down into mother grub food.”

Something snapped inside of you, like once upon a time when you were so pissing angry at Nora (you don’t even remember why), and you felt a little something pop way deep down inside your head, as gently as a bubble, and then blood started gushing out of your nose.  It was like that, but purely emotional, and what gushed out of you was conviction (though it was just as hot, metallic and unexpected as the blood had been all those years ago).

 

Which is what led you to today.  You’d never been a fighter, but you inherited Mom’s gift for science and Pop’s luck with tinkering.  The only thing you’d brought to this world was a flashlight, a cell phone, and weird pink cylinder of Mom’s that ran on batteries (special, Skaianet Laboratories™ guaranteed-safe uranium batteries) and you didn’t know what it was for, but with them, and a few other things you’d asked your hosts to procure, you’d made a little something special.

You approach the culling facility, a low, factory-looking building on a rocky hill, built over the mouth of one of the smaller brooding caverns, so that any suitably “pure” material could be sluiced down to the mother grubs while still fresh.  Instead of smokestacks, there were massive multicolored pipes jutting out from the sides and into the chasms in the earth.  The gates are flimsy, guarded only by a few imperial drones.  No one would ever want to come here, most trolls were too inculcated to the idea that anyone who was culled deserved it, and the drones deterred everyone else.  You gulp at the sight of them though.  These two are even bigger than the bucket hauler that had taken your lover, and their hide is as thick as plate armor.  You wonder if you can really get him out, if he’s even still alive.  But then you see that each drone is wearing an almost opaque visor, and that the armor-thick hides were _actually_ armor, and any bit of exposed skin looks highly irritated.  They were just as vulnerable to sunlight as any troll, you realize, maybe more so.

“Tally-ho,” you whisper under your breath, and throw one of your improvised weapons.  It’s a little disc with twitching insect legs, some kind of cell-phone analogue that they used here.  You’d stripped most of its insides and replaced them with a potent explosive, and a few other things.

The little legs take tight hold of the drone’s arm, sharp points burrowing into its skin.  It grunts and tries to smack it off as if it was no worse than a mosquito, and that’s just when it explodes.  The disc shapes the blast inwards, towards the drone’s body, and propels a dozen glass marbles, carefully chosen for their light refractive properties, each imbedded with a uranium powered UV light.  The imperial drone screams as its blood boiled from the inside, thick black goop hemorrhaging from its wound.

The other roars as a fragment strikes its visor, cracking it in half.  It turns wildly, eyes trying to scan for you, blinded almost entirely by the daylight.  You whip out your handy-dandy flashlight.  Of all the alterations you’d made to your gear, this was the easiest one.  The only trouble had been acquiring a welder’s mask and lead lined gloves to safely handle the thing, and since no one on Alternia needs a license for anything even remotely dangerous, that was a synch.  You flip the newly attached knob that turns up the brightness all the way to “solar deathpocalypse” and shine it right in the cracked visor.  You and the drone are connected by beam of blue-white light to bright to look at that seems hard as diamond and hot as the sun.  It falls over, soundlessly, its brain steaming out its eye-sockets.  You rush the gate, praying to god that you don’t die of radiation poisoning (every Skaianet™ product comes with a pill bottle of rad medicine but you’re still worried).

You slide two more spider-bombs across the floor as you run in and then duck behind some kind of service desk.  The sound of three burly imperial drones, completely unshielded in the dark room, fills the air as the light of your dirty bombs turns the atmosphere an eerie purple-green color that shouldn’t exist.  You shine your flashlight at its highest setting across the room, stifling their cries.

Something is whimpering just behind you.  You turn on your heels and growl as intimidatingly as you can.  There’s a troll, some middle-blooded kid about your age.  You haul him up to his feet and shove him against the wall, lifting up your visor to glare.  “I’m a spooky hornless demon,” you hiss, and watch as his eyes begin to tear up, “and I’m gonna pass judgment on this whole facility, but there’s someone I need to see first, if he’s still alive.”  You tell him the name of your lover, with a physical description and the date he was taken on.

The troll swallows.  “He’s a mutant,” he begins, and you slam him against the wall and tell him his sample was contaminated and he’s nothing of the kind.  “If you say so, oh Merciful Angel of Judgment,” he says, sweatily.  “But the point is _they_ think he’s a mutant, and…” he trails off, looking like he’s about to vomit.

You growl to yourself, and unsheathe your weapon.  You’re still not much of a fighter but this thing is pretty scary looking, you think.  You made it out of the pink tube thing, reinforcing it with metal to the point that it could withstand the increased power you gave to its vibrating mechanism.  It rumbles like thunder and begins to glow red-hot, a pair of diodes you fixed to the ends emitting enough UV light to make the troll nauseous.  He talks.  “He’s on the second floor,” he sniffles.  “Where they…make imperial drones.”

 

There he is, strapped to an operating table, yellow blood stains all around the lower half, black tubes pumping him full of black goop, mouth slathered with royal jelly.  He’s changed, but you can tell, it’s him.  His beautiful hunter’s moon horns and the lines of his jaw, not yet covered with the pebbled, chitinous plates like most of his head, are dead giveaways.  He was already twice as big as he had been, his arms stretched to the length of his legs.  His horns were blackening at the base, and he was sprouting several more along the crown of his skull.  “Joey,” he mutters, voice thick and burbling.  You’re sure that he’s going to ask you to kill him, but you tell him to go fuck himself before he can, and you place a kiss right on his lips, damaged and hardened and insectile, but still _his,_ to shut him up.

Within seconds your vibrosword has cut through the straps holding him down, and within minutes you and he are limping out of the culling facility.  Within the hour, you both are standing on the nearest hill, watching it.  Your hostage had called in reinforcements as soon as you left the room, of course, but since this had never happened before it took a while to organize a response.  Two hours later there were only a few flying pods dispensing legislacerators onto the scene to investigate.  The sun was beginning to set; day was very short on Alternia.  You waited for them to go inside before you pulled out the detonator.

“Let’s do it together,” you say to your lover, the once-troll, now imperial drone (well, partly; you wonder if he’ll ever heal to be the way he was before, or if he’ll go full drone, or if he’ll be stuck in between forever, but that’s for future you to worry over), and his massive hand encloses your small one, his clawed thumb on top of your soft pinkish human thumb, and you both push the button.

You watch together as the culling facility falls into the chasm, multicolored fire shooting up through the blood-pipes for hours and hours afterward.

**Author's Note:**

> yeah I kinda stretched the premise a huge amount


End file.
